The pot farm next door: Black market weed operations inundate California suburb, cops say

A CNN Investigation has found a hot spot for illegal pot farms hiding inside upscale residential homes. The state’s lax weed laws make it hard to stop.

Just after dawn on a recent spring morning, police dressed in tactical gear and armed with a search warrant pounded on the front door of an upscale home in a quiet suburban neighborhood an hour outside San Francisco. When no one answered, the officers with California’s Department of Cannabis Control, which polices the legal sale of marijuana in the state, took a battering ram to the steel-reinforced door. When the door didn’t budge, they used a power saw to cut their way through a fortified back entrance and into the spacious five-bedroom property. Inside, investigators found precisely what they were looking for: evidence of yet another black-market marijuana operation hidden in plain sight amid the cookie-cutter homes of suburbia. They removed 80 pounds of weed from the pricey two-story home in Antioch, California. With curious neighbors looking on, they repeated the spectacle twice more on the same block that morning in late April. The raids filled a dump truck with about $1 million worth of illicit weed cultivated by unlicensed growers. Although cars were parked in the driveways, no people were found in any of the homes and no arrests were made. Among California’s marijuana cops at Cannabis Control, Antioch has developed a reputation as a hub for high-yield, covert indoor grow operations. They have raided at least 60 alleged grow houses in the city over the past two years and suspect well over 100 more remain in operation. But that’s not all. Investigators say the illegal pot production in Antioch provides a glimpse of a hidden world – one that mirrors a trend playing out not only in California, but in states such as Oklahoma, Oregon, New Mexico and Maine: groups of people with apparent ties to foreign countries – most notably China – producing weed in colossal volumes.